Critical Situations: A Rhetoric for Writing in Communities

Critical Situations encourages the reader to identify “critical situations” in their communities, to develop rhetorical strategies for taking action in those situations, and to produce community-based writing projects.

Sharon Crowley / Michael Stancliff
Critical Situations

Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff’s inquiry-driven, brief rhetoric, Critical Situations, encourages students to identify “critical situations” in their communities, to develop rhetorical strategies for taking action in those situations, and to produce community-based writing projects.

Read what reviewers said about this exciting new text:

“Critical Situations is a smart, provocative, truly original approach to the writing classroom that demands students take writing seriously. By emphasizing the workings of rhetoric on the national scene and in the local peer group, it enables students to see that words matter.”

–Melissa Ianetta, University of Delaware

“The approach to writing here is one that many of us who teach writing as citizenship greatly respect, but rarely can see in a textbook. There are, of course, lots of textbooks that treat the subject of community and citizenship, but most treat those as hypothetical concepts and make the classroom a place to talk about what one might do, rather than a place where we discuss what we are doing. . . . In that way, this text has figured out [how to support] a course’s work if the course’s works isn’t text based.”

–Dominic F. DelliCarpini, York College of Pennsylvania

Critical Situations “makes rhetoric available to students without burdening them with too much of the history and theory. It also refuses to make rhetoric prescriptive and . . . consistently invites us to consider how to use rhetoric in whatever critical situation we find ourselves.”

–David Coogan, Virginia Commonwealth University

“Critical Situations has a number of qualities that make it distinctive from other writing textbooks I’ve seen. First, it’s historical rhetorical approach infuses a book without overwhelming students with terminology they can’t understand or use. . . . Second, it’s strong emphasis on situated writing allows students to have a say in aspects of their lives in which they most need to find an appropriate forum and craft an appropriate voice. . . . Third, the flexible organization should allow different sorts of teachers to use the book in the ways that make sense for their own classes. I am very impressed.”

–Libby Miles, University of Rhode Island

This “refreshingly rhetorical approach to composition . . . embraces a civic approach to invention that engages students in responsible, citizen-based writing.”

–Glen McClish, San Diego State University

“I see the text as wonderfully distinct and special in its content, scope, and approach. For example, the sustained attention to context, ethics, and evidence are presented through rich discussions supported by careful attention to the support work writers are asked to produce. Workshops that prompt writers to consider group work as significantly as these do, for example, indicate to students that group work is a serious, scholarly, and context-specific activity. I believe the text offers a new approach to teaching writing and provides students (and teachers) the tools and scaffolding needed to [understand] writing as context-specific inquiry.”

–Lee Nickoson-Massey, Elon University